A Bit Rusty

Most of our discussions about changing the canon revolve around adding onetime marginalized writers. But there’s a flipside to this — who do we need to eject? In a Bookends column for the Times, James Parker and Francine Prosepick greats that are no longer great.

Thomas Beckwith
is a staff writer for The Millions and an MFA candidate at Johns Hopkins. Prior to coming to Baltimore, he studied literature and worked in IT while living in Dublin, Ireland. You can find him on Twitter at @tdbeckwith.

Chemikal Underground, the Glasgow label that first launched Mogwai and Arab Strap, steps into the literary realm with its first audio collection of stories, The Year of Open Doors. You can listen to an excerpt--Arab Strap's own Aidan Moffat reads his story "The Donaldson Boy."

We showed you ours, and you showed us yours. Here's a Storify of the 60+ responses we got when we asked you to invite us into your #writespace. Peep our Tumblr this weekend, where we'll be featuring some of our favorites. And of course, keep 'em coming: tag a picture of where you write with #writespace on Twitter or Tumblr and we'll be sure to take note.

The 3 Quarks Daily annual prize for Arts and Literature blog writing has been announced! Nominations are open in the comments of the announcement. This year's judge is author, professor, blogger, intellect Laila Lalami. Dear readers, feel free to nominate any Millions writing you enjoyed here. And to the guest contributors out there, be sure to nominate your Millions contributions!

Enlightenment comes in many guises, and though we usually think of it as arriving in a koi pond or a distant mountaintop, we can also find it, as the protagonist of Year in Reading alumTom McCarthy’snew novel attempts to do, on Staten Island. In The New Republic, David Marcusreads the book.

The term “academic writing” is controversial, not least because it implies that academics have an odd and persnickety way of writing. In a blog post for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothmanexamines the genre, looking back on his time in grad school to argue that academic writing is a “fraught and mysterious thing.”